Oil and gas drilling clouds the West's air

A worker releases a burst of gas, part of maintenance
operations among the sand dunes in the Jack Morrow Hills north of
Rock Springs, Wyoming

Kevin Moloney

Energy industry’s air pollution
increasing

There’s good news and bad
news about air quality in the West. The good news is that, by two
measurements, it’s improving: Sulfur dioxide emissions from
coal-fired power plants have dropped 35 percent since 1998, and
total emissions from motor vehicles are declining, due to the
adoption of emission-control technology.

But in the past
few years, pollution from oil and gas drilling "has emerged as a
significant concern," according to Patrick Cummins, co-director of
the Western Regional Air Partnership, which aims to reduce air
pollution. The group includes the Western Governors’
Association, tribes and state governments.

The Rocky
Mountain states have become the energy industry’s favorite
target, and that means pollution from tens of thousands of engines
on drilling rigs, compressors and water pumps, from New Mexico to
Montana. Thousands of storage tanks in gas fields vent chemical and
natural gas fumes, and nobody knows how many leaks there are in the
thousands of miles of gas pipes. The trucks that service the wells
raise dust clouds on huge networks of dirt roads. And waste fluids
and gases are often disposed of in open-air fires, called "flares."

In all, environmentalists say, oil and gas operations
emit more than 200 hazardous compounds, including nitrogen oxide, a
triple threat because it forms haze, ozone and acidic
precipitation.

Cummins’ group just completed the
first comprehensive inventory of emissions from the West’s
oil and gas fields. It found that the industry spewed out 310,000
tons of nitrogen oxide in 2002. That’s about half the amount
emitted by power plants, and one-sixth the amount from motor
vehicles. But the recent upswing in drilling means that the
industry’s air pollution has increased since 2002, Cummins
says.

And with thousands of new wells proposed for the
Rockies, the problem will only get worse.

Hit
or miss

Even trying to monitor the industry’s air
quality is a challenge in the West: Most monitoring stations are
located in cities, where they can measure the worst air quality, or
in the backcountry, where the best air is found. Only a handful are
located near oil and gas fields.

So for the most part,
the industry’s pollution can only be estimated. Researchers
use mathematical computer models so complex that predicting impacts
from a gas-field expansion can require a year of calculations. And
even then the predictions amount to a best guess.

Air-quality standards are not easy to enforce, either. The Clean
Air Act says that the region’s air quality can be only
slightly degraded from baselines established more than 15 years
ago. But although the act requires the states to regulate the
industry’s few major sources, such as gas-processing plants,
it doesn’t directly cover the thousands of smaller sources
throughout the industry’s fields. The states have regulations
on some of the small sources, but they’re hit or miss.

Of the three main energy-producing states —
Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico —Wyoming has the strictest
rules on emissions from compressors and pumps. But none of those
states regulates the smoke-belching diesel engines that power most
drilling rigs.

Wyoming’s biggest natural gas
development, the Jonah Field near Pinedale, has become a test case
for the amount of pollution that future drilling will cause. Plans
call for adding 3,100 wells to the 1,000 already in place. In
nearby fields, thousands more wells may be drilled (HCN, 8/8/05:
Industry walks a fuzzy line between preservation and extortion).
That could result in increased haze in Pinedale for a third of the
year, according to the Wyoming Outdoor Council, and affect the
views in several wilderness areas and two national parks. Standards
set up to protect human health from ozone and particulate matter
could also be exceeded in the fields.

Getting a grip on
pollution

Faced with that prospect, Wyoming’s
Department of Environmental Quality is working with two federal
agencies — the Bureau of Land Management, which oversees most
of the West’s oil and gas fields, and the Environmental
Protection Agency — to limit any increase in pollution from
Jonah.

The Wyoming agency not only requires emission
controls on many compressors and pumps in the Jonah Field, it also
prohibits venting from many tanks. This year, it began requiring
companies to get permits for flaring, leading to a decrease in that
activity. It has installed three air-quality monitors in the area,
and plans to install four more monitors next year. "We’ve
just started (the enforcement effort)," says Dan Olson, head of the
agency’s air-quality division.

The BLM is
considering whether to follow the EPA’s recent recommendation
that drilling rigs in the Jonah Field switch to cleaner engines.
Some companies are voluntarily reducing emissions in the area, and
helping to pay for monitoring. Randy Teeuwen, spokesman for EnCana,
one of the leaders, says the company wants to earn "support for
responsible natural gas development in the communities where we
operate."

Environmentalists are closely tracking the
progress of the agencies and companies in the Jonah Field, says
Bruce Pendery, a lawyer for the Wyoming Outdoor Council.
"It’s going to require a more assertive approach," he says.
But if the air pollution problem is tackled responsibly, the Jonah
Field could become a model for the rest of the industry.

Elsewhere in the West, environmental groups have raised air-quality
issues in lawsuits challenging the BLM’s plans for increased
drilling in New Mexico’s San Juan Basin and in the Powder
River Basin, an immense field of coalbed methane wells in Wyoming
and Montana. Some groups would like entire gas fields to be
evaluated as major sources, so the Clean Air Act can be applied
more directly. After all, says Dan Randolph of the San Juan
Citizens Alliance, a gas field "isn’t a bunch of separate
activities; it is one plant in a sense."